Chapter 1: Period 1

The New World Beginnings

From 33,000 B.C.E to 1769 C.E.

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Several billion years ago, that whirling speck of cosmic dust known as the earth, fifth in size among the planets, came into being.

About 6,000 years ago only a minute in geological time—recorded history of the Western World began. Certain people in the Middle East, developing a written culture, gradually emerged from the haze of the past.

500 years ago only a few seconds figuratively speaking European explorers stumbled on the americas. This dramatic accident forever altered the future of both the Old World and new, and of Africa and Asia as well.

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The Shaping Of North America

Planet Earth took on its present form slowly. Some 225 million years ago, a single supercontinent, called pangea by a geologist, contained all the world's dry land.

Then enormous chunks of terrain began to drift away from the colossal land mass, opening the Atlantic and Indian oceans, narrowing the Pacific ocean, and forming the great continents of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and the Americas.

The existence of a single original continent has been proven in part by the discovery of nearly identical species of fish that swim today in Long separated freshwater lakes throughout the world

Continued shifting and folding of the Earth's crust thrust up mountain ranges. The Appalachians were probably formed even before Continental separation, perhaps 350 million years ago.

The majestic ranges of Western North America the Rockies, the Syria Nevada, the Cascades, and the Coast Ranges arose much more recently, geologically speaking, some 135 million to 25 million years ago.

They are truly "American" mountains, born after the continent took on its own separation geological identity.

By about 10 million years ago, Nature had sculpted the basic geological shape of North america. The continent was anchored in its own Northern corner by the massive Canadian Shield—A zone underage by ancient Rock, probably the first part of what became the North American land mass to have emerged above sea level.

A narrow Eastern coastal plan or "tidewater" region, creased by many River valleys, slope gently upward to the timeworn ridges of the appalachians.

Those ancient mountains slanted away on their western side into the huge midcontinental basin that rolled downward to the Mississippi Valley bottom and then rose relentlessly to the towering peaks of the Rockies.

From the Rocky Mountain crest—the "roof of America" the land fell off jaggedly into the intermountain great basin, bound by the Rockies on the east and the Sierra and Cascade ranges on the west.

The valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and the Willamette-Puget Sound trough seamed the interiors of present day California, Oregon, and Washington. The land at last met of the forming pacific, where the Coast Ranges rose steeply from the sea.

Nature laid a chill hand over much of the terrain and the Great Ice Age, beginning about 2 million years ago.

Two-mile-thick ice sheets crept from the polar regions to blanket parts of Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

In North America the great glaciers carpeted most of the present-day Canada, and the United States as far as Southwest as a line stretching from Pennsylvania through the Ohio Country and the Dakotas to the Pacific Northwest.

When the glaciers finally retreated about 10,000 years ago, they left the North American landscape transformed and much as we know it today.

The weight of the gargantian ice mantle head depressed the level of the Canadian Shield.

The grinding and flushing action of the moving and melting ice had scoured away the shield's topsoil, pitting its Rocky surface with thousands of shallow depressions into which the melting glaciers flowed to form lakes.

The same glacial action scooped out and filled the Great lakes. They originally drained southwards throughout the Mississippi River system and the Gulf of mexico.

When the melting ice unblocked the Gulf of St.Lawrence, the lake water sought the St.Lawrence River outlet to the Atlantic ocean, lowering the Great lakes' level and leaving the Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio system to drain the enormous midcontinental basin between the Appalachian and the rockies.

Similarly, in the west, water from the melting glaciers filled sprawling Lake Bonneville, covering much of present-day Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.

It drained to the Pacific Ocean throughout the Snake and Columbia River systems until diminishing rainfall from the ebbing ice cap lowered the water level, cutting off access to the Snake River Outlet. Deprived of both inflow and drainage, the giant Lake became a gradually shrinking in land sea. It grew increasingly saline, slowly evaporated, and left an arid, mineral rich desert.

Only the Great Salt Lake remains as a relic of bonneville's former vastness.

Today in Lake bonneville's ancient beaches are visible on mountainsides up to 1,000 ft above the dry floor of the great basin.